


The Starving Faithful

by ebenflo



Series: Red & Black [1]
Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Angst, Crime, Death, Deception, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Lies, POV Second Person, blacklist - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-03 11:58:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2850056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebenflo/pseuds/ebenflo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he finds you three years later it's on the other side of the world and you're on the straight and narrow, just as you have been every day since he was gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Starving Faithful

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from the song that inspired this series "Take Me To Church" by Hozier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSVMgRr6pw

They call you _La Petite Mort_. You barely make five-five even in a decent pair of Louboutins but your reputation precedes you. He calls you by a different name entirely and constantly reminds you that your bark is worse than your bite; you take it as a compliment. You take payment in the form of jade, and jade only. Death is your business; you deliver it neatly and efficiently, with surgical precision. In the murky grim of the underworld you are a sterile blade. Ironic, how the study of saving lives applies to taking them too.

Which is why you're shocked at the sucker-punch his death delivers. You receive word via an instant-message that flashes across the screen of your tablet while you sit in the departure lounge of a South-East Asian airport. You only have a moment to process it before the message disappears, another one of the wonders of the cyber-age. You drown the news with coffee black as sin but it doesn't rid you of the rising bile at the back of your throat, and when the plane begins to taxi down the runway you sink into the buttery leather of your first-class seat and try to teach yourself to breathe again. Later you will think of this moment, time and time again, and argue that really you stopped breathing entirely and wouldn't start again for three years.

You bury him on a crisp Autumn day, when the dampness on your cheeks is easily mistaken for dew. You wear a tailored trench over beige slacks and a black wool fedora that smells of him. At home you'll take it off and never touch it again. You stand alone amongst a handful of strangers, all with hidden secrets and agendas, listening to the priest recite lines that bear no resemblance to his character. By the time you strip your clothes off and open the bottle of Chivas, the smell of his cologne begins to fade from your skin and you think that just maybe there might be life after death for you. You lock your heart away in that room and in the morning when the sirens wail down the street and neighbours gather to stare at the flames, you resist the temptation to look back in the rearview and instead nudge the gas with your toe.

You take up a residency in Toledo but the shine wears off quickly and you think perhaps it was never there to begin with. After enduring re-heated Chinese takeout and lukewarm sex with a lab assist called Phil, who cries after he comes, you think _enough_. Toledo becomes Nebraska; Nebraska, Yorkshire. Macau, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Shanghai.

When he finds you three years later it's on the other side of the world and you're on the straight and narrow, just as you have been every day since he was gone. With him died your fire and you turned your efforts towards finding ways to cheat death instead of creating it. You don't even hear him enter the room. The years have not stripped him of his stealth.

"You still pin your hair up the same," he nonchalantly notes, as if he's been abroad on recreational leave instead of allegedly buried beneath the cold ground in Detroit.

You slowly turn to face him and it's like nothing's changed. Same half-cocked smirk. Same three-piece-suit. Older, perhaps, in the harsh fluorescent lighting, but then there's no erasing the experience lines on your face either.

"We buried you."

"You buried a box."

You didn't really think the punch was going to inflict much damage and the sharp cry you let out when your fist connects is pitiful, but the red mark across his face is at least somewhat satisfying. It does nothing to deter him. He stares at you intently, a silent challenge. For once in your life you don't rise to it. For once you aren't the strong one, the calm one. You crumple like tissue paper, sobbing against his lapel. He holds you there calmly with one hand against the flaxen waves of your hair, though beneath your cheek his heart trembles. He'll deny it later and brush it off as an arhythmia but you know better. You sob and it comes in great ugly gulps. You hate him because of how much he reminds you of the great capacity you still have to love another.

*

"Where?"

"The particulars don't matter," he murmurs from behind a private smile while he presses a cold pack to your throbbing hand. In the privacy of your office he has his suit jacket off. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows, revealing tanned arms that suggest a self-imposed banishment somewhere in the sun. You entertain a brief fantasy of escaping your mundane existence to join him on the Amalfi coast, jetting around on a vespa, before realising how ridiculous that sounds.

"They matter." _You matter._

"Another time," he hushes, shaking his head. His stare is molten. "I missed you."

"Fuck off."

He chuckles and the low soft sound still manages to stoke the heat in your belly. You know that he knows. He always has. His lips are papery dry but soft as they run over your bruised knuckles.

"Everything I've done, everything I haven't...it was to protect you."

"Don't give me that bullshit. You let me think you were dead, how is that protecting me?" If your voice rises an octave neither of you mention it.

"Trust me, being dead is not quite as pleasurable as it sounds. Had I not believed the threat was real I would never have done it."

"And that threat is now...?"

"Eliminated." He calls your name softly and you look up into his sleepy blue eyes, unchanged after all the years and miles between you. "You remain my greatest priority...and that's why I can't stay."

The breath that returned to your lungs the moment you heard his voice leaves you again in a sudden rush.

"Red-"

"I will be there for you." He cocks his head, regards you in his own solemn way and nods slightly. "Always. Know that, trust that, if nothing else."

He unrolls his shirt sleeves and slips back into his jacket, places the brown fedora on his head and turns to leave.

"Red. Stay...please."

He halts by the door, no sign of defeat in his posture.

"If I stay...I cannot promise you anything more than I already have. And I cannot promise you that I will be able to control myself."

"Then don't."

This time it's Red who turns to face you slowly. The twitch in his lips the only betrayal of what lies beneath the surface of his cool demeanour as he takes in your fingers, lingering over the way your hair tumbles to your shoulders as you undo the pin holding it in an elaborate coil. You don't miss the way he takes in your stocking-clad feet, slipping out of their austere grey pumps, or the sharp intake of breath as you shuck out of your modest office-friendly jacket.

He sweeps off the contents of your desk and before you have time to protest the hassles of straightening your paperwork his mouth is on your collarbone and his hand vice-like on your breast. Your body is soft and pliable beneath his touch and you groan as a sweet ache ignites in your lower back. He knows you better than you know yourself.

Maybe he'll be gone in the morning. Maybe not. You try not to dwell on the darker thoughts, pushing them back into the recesses of your conscious as you give into him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading the first part of what will hopefully become a series of interludes between Red and Miss Black. The world needs more Reddington/OFC.


End file.
